Virtual Panel: Climate Adaptation, Risk & Resilience

Abstract

This panel brings together cutting-edge research on how societies understand, govern, and respond to climate risks in an era of intensifying environmental change. The papers examine climate adaptation not only as a technical or policy challenge, but as a political process shaped by values, distributional trade-offs, and institutional constraints. Several contributions focus on household- and citizen-level dynamics, analysing how socio-economic status, values, and preferences influence adaptation choices and willingness to accept trade-offs in the energy transition. Others examine how governments and institutions manage escalating climate risks, highlighting tensions between adaptation, protection, and the maintenance of existing socio-economic arrangements. Collectively, the papers show that adaptation outcomes are rarely neutral. Instead, they reflect contested decisions about who bears risks, who benefits from protection, and whose voices count in defining resilience. By combining survey experiments, comparative analysis, and policy-focused approaches, the panel illuminates how adaptation strategies can reproduce or challenge inequalities, and how public preferences interact with policy design. A central theme is the gap between formal adaptation ambitions and lived realities on the ground, particularly in contexts where climate risks intensify faster than institutional responses. The panel contributes to broader debates in environmental politics by demonstrating that effective and legitimate climate adaptation requires attention to social values, distributive justice, and political feasibility. It highlights the need to move beyond technocratic framings of resilience and instead foreground adaptation as a contested political arena in which risks, responsibilities, and futures are negotiated.

Title	Details
Internationality Vs. Sustainability: Measuring the Effectiveness and Fairness of Flight‑reduction Policies at Universities	View Paper Details
Maintaining the Status Quo Under Increasing Drought Risk: How Public Policies and Property Rights Shape Agricultural Water Uses in Western France	View Paper Details
How Do Values and Socio-Economic Status Shape Individual Climate Footprint? Evidence from Sweden, Combining Registry and Survey data	View Paper Details
Protecting and Adapting to Rising Environmental Risks: Variations in Policy-Mixes Across European Welfare States	View Paper Details
Citizen Trade-Off Preferences in the Energy Transition and Their Association with Support for Energy Technologies	View Paper Details